Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release

[Bill Denney]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Andy Adler wrote:

> My version is 2.1.42 and is about 4 years old. I'll be changing my
> web page to send people to a newer version soon (when the term ends
> and I can get a breath)

I'm not trying to rush you-- I just prefer for people to see the better 
features that we have put forward in the newer versions.

> OTOH, one advantage of the package I made was that it was very small
> (ie <4MB for a complete octave + tools). To get this small size I used
> a static link of octave + octave-forge. This niche is still unfilled
> in octave for windows installs.

It's small, but it's also has significantly fewer features.  I would guess 
that most people would be more interested in having multi-dimensional 
arrays (as starts I think around 2.1.51) than ~18MB fewer to download.  I 
know that there are parts of the world where download speeds and costs 
make smaller better, though.

> > Should we just do a special test for /cygdrive/ in the path name of the
> > editor and return a path with /cygwin (or better-- finding the actual
> > directory to cygwin)?
>
> This is way too complicated and will actually disadvantage the user.
> The user should be able to use any editor they like - cygwin or not.
>
> The correct way is to let the user choose the editor (via the EDITOR
> variable) during the install process. Then we run it with any '\'
> changed to '/'. This will work for *nix or windows.
>
> ie
>   export EDITOR="C:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"
>   octave

This doesn't fix the problem I was thinking of.  The problem that I was 
discussing is if you do that it's fine, but if you type

edit plot

at the octave prompt with an editor that is outside of the cygwin 
environment (i.e. notepad from your example), it will try to edit an empty 
file because the path it will be passed is

\usr\share\octave\2.1.73\plot\plot.m

while notepad can't find a file there, it can find the file it's looking 
for at

c:\cygwin\usr\share\octave\2.1.73\plot\plot.m

(I didn't specifically check the path to plot, so the path may be wrong, 
but the statement is generally true).

Essentially we would need to check if the editor is outside the cygwin 
environment then we may need to mangle the path to show correctly for 
being called from outside cygwin.

Bill

--
"The towels in that hotel were so thick I could hardly close my
suitcase."
  -- Yogi Berra



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